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Education Blog Posts - Page 2 of 58 - The Open College of the Arts

To find out more details about the transfer to The Open University see A New Chapter for OCA.

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Celebrating July’s assessment event thumb

Celebrating July’s assessment event

This is a note from the OCA assessment team to mark, and share, what we feel has been a phenomenal and triumphant assessment event under extraordinary circumstances. 

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A guide to tutoring prisoner students – Part 2 thumb

A guide to tutoring prisoner students – Part 2

In this blog post I want to outline the different options prisoners have for carrying out the research element of their courses. As with most things relating to prisons, the specifics of each of these will differ between establishments, but what I want to emphasise is that it will very rarely be the case that someone can’t do research – it may just take a bit of effort on their part. 

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‘Do the Trod’ thumb

‘Do the Trod’

The past couple of weeks have found us in the middle of a culture war around statues and TV but, as Ash Sarkar reminds us, ‘the context of a work – film, telly, whatever – is bigger than that piece of content on its own. Meaning is what happens when a work is in conversation with its audience’. 

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A guide to tutoring prisoner students – Part 1 thumb

A guide to tutoring prisoner students – Part 1

Tutoring prisoner students can feel like something of a minefield. It can be difficult to decipher fact from fiction from the information shared in the press about what prisoners do (and don’t) have access to, as well as what the individual is expecting from you, or you from them. Hopefully this series of blog posts can provide a bit of information and a few suggestions to help make this easier.

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Addressing the gap – What and why are there gaps at OCA? thumb

Addressing the gap – What and why are there gaps at OCA?

Last year OCA launched an ambitious new 10-year strategy, available on our website, that talked of closing equality gaps, and making a curriculum that is ‘sensitive to global and cultural contexts’. But how to get there? How do we make a curriculum that is reflective of the work and perspectives of people all around the world? How do we ensure that there are no equality gaps?

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Equality doesn’t mean treating everyone the same thumb

Equality doesn’t mean treating everyone the same

Like many, I’ve been reflecting on the recent protests following the killing of George Floyd, and the responses to the #BlackLiveMatter, in particular across Higher Education. These have ranged from the extremely thoughtful and sensitive to the very corporate and hollow. This has forced me to take a long hard look at myself and the organisation that I’m very proud to lead the Open College of the Arts and consider are we doing enough to live up to our values of diversity and inclusion?

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New course: Visual Exploration thumb

New course: Visual Exploration

The Visual Exploration unit supports a self-directed approach to exploring and articulating your personal creative voice by extending a process-led approach to how you generate ideas, develop visual and technical skills across a choice of media and technologies, and by establishing new ways of working by undertaking self-initiated projects and reflecting on the creative processes of other practitioners.

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OCA wellbeing: What’s in your wellness toolkit? thumb

OCA wellbeing: What’s in your wellness toolkit?

It’s a challenging situation we find ourselves in, and I realised that all of my usual ‘wellness tools’ are unavailable to me owing to the restrictions in place, so it’s no wonder even little day to day issues feel more difficult.

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Decolonising the curriculum – a ‘serious need’? thumb

Decolonising the curriculum – a ‘serious need’?

Dr. Andrea Stultiens replied that to her decolonising meant adding perspective, not changing from one perspective to another: ‘I’m making my gaze relative by placing other gazes next to it’.

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